It’s very clear that climate change is still overwhelmingly more frequent than any of the other combinations, justifying its inclusion on the ELT wordlists above. One reason that some of the other phrases are far less frequent may be that they haven’t cottoned on widely enough; those boomer mainstream journalists just ain’t woke! It’s also likely down to the fact that the terminology just hasn’t settled yet. While several combinations have clearly been trending, as evidenced by the WoTY choices, there’s no clear consensus yet about exactly which terms work best to describe our current situation. It’s very difficult to predict which terms will catch on or indeed which ones will be superseded by something else in a year or two’s time.

The wordlists used by ELT publishers are based on criteria around frequency in order to ensure that the basic vocabulary we teach is going to be generally useful for students. They can’t just add words willy nilly because they’re currently trending. When something becomes frequent enough to merit inclusion, like climate change, it goes in. It’d look a bit silly if climate emergency was suddenly touted as a must-teach term only to have it fade from usage or be outgunned by climate crisis or climate catastrophe a few months along the line. And what comes after the crisis has been declared? Well, there’s already talk of climate action by climate activists and looking at the corpus data, climate goals, climate targets, climate adaptation, climate strategies and climate solutions are all gaining ground.

All of which points to climate as a really key item of vocabulary that should be appearing in our ELT materials and which writers can justify including based on existing published wordlists. And remember, both publishers and vocabulary learning researchers agree that frequency-based wordlists provide a basis for a vocabulary syllabus but need to be taught alongside a good sprinkling of off-list topic vocabulary too.

Where we take it from here though I think will come down much more to classroom teachers using words like climate and environment as a springboard for discussing whatever other terms are relevant at the time they’re teaching.  You could use these Words of the Year as a starting point for discussion, take a look at some of the other ecovocabulary highlighted in dictionary blogs and activities this year, such as here  and here , compare the terms currently trending in your students’ own L1s or even explore collocations of key words directly with your students using a simple corpus tool like SkELL (designed for language learners) – try searching for words like climate, footprint, waste and environmental and clicking on ‘Word sketch’ to see the top collocates.

However you choose to tackle it though, we clearly do need to equip our learners with the language they’ll need to talk about the changing world they face. We can take our lead from linguists, lexicographers and published materials, but it’s really teachers on the ground who know what’s most relevant to their students and their context.